For working parents with school-aged kids, summers are a struggle.
Most of us can’t take two months off work, leading to the logistical feat and financial strain of trying to cobble together a schedule that occupies our children when we are not on a family holiday.
If you’re one of the parents navigating summer camps for your kids, here’s how to make it easier on your wallet and your mental load.
Summer camp is expensive, so you need to plan well in advance. Let’s start with day camps, which typically admit children aged four and older. I asked parents on social media how much they were paying, and many who responded pegged day camp costs at $200 to $400 a week, minimum. For specialty camps such as hockey, dance or science, the weekly costs skyrocket to double or triple that.
Don’t forget about the additional costs: lunches and snacks, as well as the cost of shuttling kids to and from camps, which gets trickier if you have to take multiple kids to multiple locations. And the cost of before and after-care, since most day camps end well before 5 p.m.
Overnight camps, generally for kids aged seven and older, are more expensive. Most parents who reached out to me reported costs closer to $1,500 – or more – a week.
All of this can mean forking more than thousands of dollars to cover summer camp fees, with many parents who told me they budget $4,000 to $5,000 per summer for camps, and one parent saying she spent $11,000 on summer camps this year.
Erin Estok lives in Ontario’s Halton region with her two children, aged 5 and 7 months. She said if she put her oldest daughter in camp every week of the summer and used after-care, which she needs as a working parent, it would cost $3,000 to $3,500.
“And those aren’t for the specialty or coolest camps, just the average ones,” Ms. Estok said. “To put it in perspective, $3,500 is more than our annual family vacation.”
This is where subsidized or more affordable camp options can help to reduce fees – for example, city-run day or non-profit camps tend to be much more affordable than private camps. There are also non-profits including Kids in Camp and various other non-profits and camps that provide financial assistance to families for overnight and day camps.
Some camps also offer sibling or multi-week discounts, or instalment payment options. It’s also worth noting that summer camps count as a child care expense, so they can be deducted from income during tax season (the amount varies for preschoolers and older children).
“Affordable options, while they exist, tend to sell out incredibly fast, might not be what your kid enjoys, or aren’t necessarily convenient to get to,” Calgary mom Alyssa Davies said in a social media message.
To make matters worse, the summer camp booking scramble begins in January and February, a time when parents have just finished paying Christmas bills, which means balancing camp fees with postholiday credit card bills. Which parent has thousands of dollars laying around after the holidays?
“I think the most frustrating part is the fact that you have to have your whole summer planned in February in order to get registered,” Georgetown, Ont., mom-of-two Courtney Craig-Campbell wrote in a message. ”I’ve barely recovered from Christmas and I am dropping thousands of dollars on camp.”
Planning ahead is key to budgeting for camps, and ensuring your kids snag a spot, especially if you’re prioritizing more affordable city-run day camps.
The experience of booking is cutthroat and time-consuming, described to me by many parents as being akin to The Hunger Games or trying to get tickets to a Beyoncé concert. One mom in my area of Prince Edward County, Ont. said she was at her computer refreshing her browser non-stop to get a spot in a local arts centre’s day camps, which sold out in three minutes on opening day in February.
Entrepreneur Linsay Moran, a parent who lives in Toronto, has felt the pain of booking camps for her two children. She, like many other parents I spoke to, keeps a spreadsheet outlining a list of camps, their cost, which weeks the kids are booked for, and their registration dates.
While it’s expensive and time-consuming, for many parents camps are the only option to occupy their kids while they’re working.
“It creates a hamster wheel that you have no choice but to be on,” Ms. Moran says. “Miss the deadlines, your kids miss out on camp spots. I have some friends who just refuse to participate in the madness, but then come June/July they’re panicking as they don’t have activities lined up for their kids and they have to take what’s left over.”
As someone whose kids are too young for camp, I’m thinking about how I can set aside money now in a savings account to prepare, and starting to scope out options in my area. After hearing the frustration, exasperation and massive mental and financial burden camps cause for my peers, as a parent I’m dreading summer vacation – even if my kids will live for it.
Erin Bury is the co-founder and chief executive officer of online estate planning platform Willful.co. She lives in rural Ontario with her husband and two young children.